Wish I'd said that - November 8, 2015

“Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself – and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God. All man’s love is vast and inconvenient. It is tempting, of course, to blunt its edge by caution…. First of all, such faintness is unworthy of true men…. second, last and most important, playing it safe is not Divine…. Love is the widest, choicest door into the Passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it – out of all proportion and sense. And when He rose again, He stood up like a man indeed: with glorious scars – and with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfectibility of man’s nature…. He will, at the last day, change these corruptible bodies of ours, make them like His own glorious Body and, through them, draw all things into the last city of their being…. It is, I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But in such a place as this – in a world that so regularly winds our clocks and breaks our hearts, that laughs at caution and cries from every corner for extravagation – only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.”